LA Daily News
Foster Care Fund Waiver To Expand DCFS Services
Budget allocations to help keep more families together
By Troy Anderson, Staff Writer
With only nine hours to spare before the deadline, the federal government on Friday approved a long-awaited funding waiver that will allow Los Angeles County's child-protective system to use a large chunk of its budget on innovative services to keep families together.
"This is revolutionary," county Department of Children and Family Services Director David Sanders said. "This is the first (large waiver) in the country. It's absolutely huge. It completely changes the financial incentives within the child-welfare system for the state and county."
The state of California, at the request of DCFS, first sought the flexible funding waiver in mid-2004 following a Daily News series that revealed that government and private contractors profit from foster children.
DCFS officials admitted that up to half the children in foster and adoptive homes were needlessly placed in a system that is often more dangerous than their homes. Officials said state and federal laws had created incentives for placing children in foster care since the county and its contractors receive $30,000 to $150,000 annually for each child.
The waiver, for which up to 20 counties in the state can opt to participate, will allow DCFS to use $360 million to $400 million of its $1.4 billion budget on services to prevent the placement of children in foster care.
Currently, nearly the entire DCFS budget must be spent on administrative expenses and the costs of maintaining children in foster and group homes.
Many child-welfare experts argue that this inflexibility is one of the major flaws in the existing funding system.
Under the waiver, the department will have a large pool of money that can be spent to help families improve parenting skills, control their anger, obtain mental health services and overcome addictions and homelessness.
"The idea is to allow California to use those federal foster care funds in a variety of new ways with the hope that this will result in fewer kids being abused and neglected, less
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children needing foster care and for those that do go into foster care, speedier reunification or speedier adoptions," said Wade F. Horn, U.S. Health & Human Services Department assistant secretary for children and families.
Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va., said the waiver "takes away the cruel incentive to needlessly throw children in foster care" to obtain federal reimbursements.
"Now, potentially, the money can be shifted to safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster care," Wexler said. "Not only will that help these children, it will also free up social workers' time to find the children in real danger so fewer of these cases are likely to be missed."
As negotiations between the state and federal government wore on for nearly two years, Sanders and other child-welfare experts worried that recent improvements made in the system were in jeopardy.
Since Sanders took over the department in March 2003, the number of children in foster homes has dropped from 30,000 to 22,300 now, the percentage of children abused in foster and relative caregiver homes has dropped 30 percent and the average length of time children spend in foster care has dropped from 1,100 days to 636. At the same time, the percentage of children abused in the community dropped 6 percent.
Janis Spire, executive director of the Alliance for Children's Rights, said the waiver approval is a "great vote of confidence" in the reforms made under Sanders.
"While there is no sure fix for child welfare, to create flexibility in funding is the most optimistic approach we have to attend to the needs of the children and families most at risk," Spire said.
County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who called U.S. Reps. David Drier and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon on Thursday to urge Horn to sign the waiver, said the reforms were made under the existing "rigid federal fiscal constraints."
"This is going to support those abused and neglected children in finding stable homes, which they need to grow up in a healthy environment," Antonovich said. "Children are a gift from God, but assembly is required. It means having healthy families and good community and spiritual support."
The waiver California submitted was based on a proposal made by President George W. Bush that allowed states to receive capped child-welfare funding in return for flexibility on how a large portion of those funds are spent.
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The negotiations bogged down after the state asked to exclude some costs from the capped funding.
Horn said there were a number of very complicated issues that had to be resolved, including ensuring that it didn't end up costing taxpayers more money.
In the past decade, 18 states have implemented 26 child-welfare waivers to test innovative programs and services, including subsidized guardianship, flexible funding, substance-abuse services and intensive preventive services.
But Sanders said the county's waiver is the largest and broadest. "We are essentially saying we want to re-create the entire system."
If the waiver is successful in California, Horn said, officials hope to expand it nationwide.
"The waiver is an interim Band-Aid of the broader problem of how we fund foster care to begin with," said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles.
"There has been ongoing efforts in Congress and the critical work by the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care to encourage those reform efforts. There is a growing recognition in Congress that the time is upon us to embrace these new approaches and recommendations."